NASA’s top climate scientist says the globe is warming at a faster pace than seen anytime in the past millennium, so it is “very unlikely” the world can contain the rise in temperatures to the target set in the 2015 Paris climate accord, reported The Guardian. So far this year, global temperatures are 1.38 degrees C above the levels experienced in the 19th century, “perilously close to the 1.5 degrees C” limit in the accord.
This year is on track to be the warmest since modern record keeping began in 1880, with the strong El Niño weather pattern helping to drive up temperatures. NASA said its analysis of ice cores and sediments indicate temperatures are rising more rapidly in recent decades than in the past 1,000 years at a minimum, said The Guardian.
“Maintaining temperatures below the 1.5 degree C guardrail requires significant and very rapid cuts in carbon dioxide emissions or co-ordinated geo-engineering,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “That is very unlikely. We are not even yet making emissions cuts commensurate with keeping warming below 2 degrees C.” The newspaper said, “Schmidt is the highest-profile scientist to effectively write-off the 1.5 degree C target, which was adopted at December’s UN summit after heavy lobbying from island nations that risk being inundated by rising seas if temperatures exceed this level.”